Author Rights vs Self-Archiving in Spanish Scientific Journals

Abstract

The paper analyzes publishers’ copyright policies and self-archiving conditions of Spanish scientific journals. Data are extracted from the directory DULCINEA that contains information of 1318 Spanish journals, of which 775 (61%) allow some form of self-archiving to be about 60% of the post-print version and allowing them 87% of the deposit of the version of record. In 72% of journals the deposit can be performed immediately after publication and in 16% after article acceptance. 72% of the journals are freely available without charge to the user this figure raises up to 86% if free access after an embargo is considered. Only 18% of the journals use Creative Commons licenses. The adoption of different open access journals model in Spain is favorable, however there is still a high percentage of journals (39%) that do not provide any information about authors and publishers rights and that difficult or inhibits reuse of published articles.